Me:  Prodigal, who are you with today?

 

Prodigal:  Just a friend.

 

Me:  Your friend looks mean?

 

Prodigal:  He said he was a good person and followed the law to the letter.

 

Me:  I have a story today about the Pharisees and Jesus and how they used the law to justify evil.

 

Ravi Zacharias begins in his book Jesus Among Other Gods with this insight on Jesus and the Pharisees.

 

When evil justifies itself by posturing as morality, God becomes the devil and the devil, God.  That exchange makes one impervious to reason.  Certainly, the high priests represented that lot.  Nothing, absolutely nothing that Jesus could have said would have convinced them of who He really was or caused them even to care.  Their capacity to hate and their love for ceremonial law far exceeded any desire to know truth and goodness.

Jesus knew that their love for the law was nothing more than a desire to find ways to manipulate the law to serve their own immoral ends.  Anytime Scripture is quoted for the express purpose of advancing one’s selfish aims, light is turned into darkness.

 

My prayer is that the Pharisees’ eyes that are reading this will be open to the evil that is being done by loving the law more then Jesus.

 

Matthew 22:15

Then the Pharisees went and plotted how to entangle him in his words.

 

Jennifer Van Allen

 

www.theprodigalpig.com

www.faithincounseling.org